Environment

"I am very grateful to my many Stanford student and faculty energy colleagues for all they have taught me about the importance of the energy challenge and the opportunities we have to change our energy systems in a very positive way."

The White House announced that Professor Franklin "Lynn" Orr, Jr., '69, director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and speaker at Stanford+Connects in Atlanta, will be nominated by President Obama to oversee energy and science research programs in the U.S. Department of Energy.

“Ideally, you would like [students] to leave Stanford with a higher level of what I call geoliteracy—an understanding of how the Earth works.”

Rosemary Knight, PhD '85, professor of geophysics and senior fellow at the Woods Institute, hopes to one day have an I-Earth (Introduction to Planet Earth) class required for all Stanford undergrads. In the meantime, she continues to teach geoliteracy to students of all majors through her popular "Water Course," a project-based class that requires students to analyze (and taste!) their hometown water: "Water, Water Everywhere-and Lots of Kinds to Drink."

"There’s a train wreck coming and we are in a position to slow that down and make it not so bad."

Did you know the oceans soak up over a quarter of the CO2 produced by humans? While this absorption helps slow the greenhouse effect responsible for global warming, it speeds up reef decay and threatens to wipe out entire ecosystems. Steve Palumbi, professor in marine sciences and director of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, considers the consequences of an increasingly acidic ocean.

“We don’t currently charge ourselves anything for the privilege of putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We need to recognize that that generates real costs and be willing to pay those ourselves.”

“Global hunger problems are not all in very remote places that you might never have been to before—they’re right here. One out of five kids live in households that have real food problems.” Professor Rosamond Naylor shows us the personal side of food and nutrition security issues. The problem, she tells us, is not food production, but rather the food supply chain: more and more grains are getting tied up in the ethanol market and never making it down to the people who need them.